Let's give the humble mouse a swansong - it won't be long before we find ourselves dealing with people who have only seen them in the movies.

Few things irritate me as much as my hand coming into contact with bits of stuff on the mouse mat. Brushing is often ineffective because some kinds of gunk don't shift when a contact technique is applied, and often my aim is poor because I don't want to take my eyes off the screen or release the mouse at that moment.

So what we're talking about is a mouse with an internal fan that fires when you hold both buttons down. Getting a sufficient blast from typical power sources like USB or batteries while also achieving good mat coverage would require cunning venting - I'm picturing a thin gap all the way around the base of the mouse, angled so that the air hits the surface of the mat at a shallow angle and continues horizontally along the surface of the mat without losing too much oomph.

There are a lot of similar airy mouse concepts including the vacuum and hover versions, but I'm pretty sure they're all trying to solve different problems.
-- oscil8, May 10 2012

You could get enough energy from a USB port to fire an igniter to initiate a thin pad of nitrocellulose ... that would give a suitable blast of high-pressure gas ... [+]
-- 8th of 7, May 10 2012


I think that a vacuum mouse might work better, although you would probably need to keep it running while you move you hand around the mouse pad a bit, and you would have to empty the dirt from you mouse (ew).

Blowing would probably still work though. [+]
-- erenjay, May 10 2012


[+] What erenjay and 21q said. And there is enough space inside a mouse to serve as a collection pan for the vacuumed-up dirt.
-- swimswim, May 10 2012


Could the dirt be compressed into pellets (perhaps with the aid of atmospheric moisture and skin oils harvested from the user's fingertips)? The pellets could be deposited by the mouse as it roams across your desk.
-- pocmloc, May 10 2012


//my aim is poor because I don't want to take my eyes off the screen//

Perhaps some stuff-detection whiskers on the mouse could feed signals to software, which would then generate a dynamically positioned stuff-icon on the desktop; its location being such that if you move the mouse pointer to the stuff-icon, the mouse is in the right position to vent at or ingest the stuff.
-- lurch, May 10 2012


//The problem with blowing is that you're just creating another mess elsewhere (like possibly into the keyboard, which I find even more maddening) that will still need to be cleaned.//

Yep vacuuming is tidier overall, but mice are typically found in the workplace (along with other legacies of technology such as a standard Windows XP image, Microsoft tablets and policies banning the use of cloud storage), so cleaning and vacuuming is not my problem unless the grit has aggregated to casually observable size

//Could the dirt be compressed into pellets// //Perhaps some stuff-detection whiskers//

I think the mouse should also emit a few high-pitched noises when it's it use to disguise the irritating fan noise. I also understand that milk-based protein is a good power source if it can be "fed" into the mouse somehow
-- oscil8, May 11 2012


I have always had a problem with my mouse hand getting cold, maybe if the mouse had some kind of cloth covering...
-- erenjay, May 12 2012



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